Things worth knowing

Friday, 17 October 2014

Postik notes

I was recently at the excellent Petrie museum in London. It's got loads of ancient Egyptian stuff, including a lot of beads. They also had this board:

It says 'Please write any comments on postik notes'.

Someone has rather snarkily corrected the error by putting a squiggly line under the word and writing the correct word and putting 'sp' next to it. This is overkill, but no matter.

I thought the mistake was quite charming. Post-It notes are sticky, after all, so 'postik' is kind of an eggcorn, almost (it doesn't quite fit the definition). And 'post' is used in a not-very-British way - I think you post things on walls more in American English than UK English, and Lynne Murphy confirms this at her blog Separated by a Common Language. So that makes it more likely that the person didn't realise the meaning of the name Post-It (i.e. display it on the wall).